Saturday, November 23, 2013

Fair Weather Fan

The temp at about 8:00 this morning in my backyard. (Photo by Jeno Berta.)

Greetings All:

Today, I am a fair weather fan. I will own it and to my friends who are bearing the cold outside of Kinnick Stadium, I tip my (stocking) cap to you. It's gotta be cold out there and I suspect the stadium concessions will do a brisk (bad pun, sorry) of selling hot coco.

I thought I was going to the game. I split tickets with my friend and I had reason to believe this was my game. I was looking forward to it as my beloved Iowa Hawkeyes are playing our arch-rival Michigan. It is the last home game of the season and the Saturday schedule has shook out that I could make the game. Then I found out that this was not my game and another friend was unable to go up with me. I had no concerns about being able to buy a ticket. For some games, you'll pay premium and like it. For today's game, I suspect I could get a ticket cheep and then really cheep if I waited until after kick-off. (The only problem with that is you miss the National Anthem and that is a no-starter with me.)

So I was on the bubble about heading to my school, the University of Iowa. It's a short drive and I always like being back on campus. I like universities and take pride that my Alma Mater is a state school. True, it ain't Harvard. Then again, Harvard has not educated generations of sons and daughters of the prairie. My school has. The older I get, the more I wish I would have taken advantage of the buildings actually within the campus as opposed to all the "public houses" that were located outside of the campus. I am particularly impressed with the medical school. We in Hawkeye country help heal a bunch of folks. It's another thing to be proud of.

Today, however, is not about books but blocking. It's a football Saturday. I understand that for some people, football has no appeal. I joke that I have taken my wife to precisely two games at Kinnick early in our relationship-her first and her last. She's just not into it and that's her right. I made the miscalculation that she, being a nice Jewish girl from North New Jersey, would love to be out in the cold watching a sport she barely understood for hours at a time. She told me later, "I liked it because you liked it." Makes perfect sense to me.

So here I am on a Saturday, about an hour away from kick-off, warm and inside. Does that make me a fair weather fan? Yeah. I think what pushed me into the "NO" vote for today was realizing at 10:30 last night as I waited to pick up my daughter and her friends from the latest Hunger Games movie that I would be spending a good hour getting all my cold-weather gear together. Nope, going to bed. Not only am a fair weather fan, but a tired one, too.

Had I made it up to the game, I would have brought another one of these home with me. (Photo by Jeno Berta, fair-use claimed of any copyrighted images displayed. ANF stands for, "America Needs Farmers.")

One of the things about being in my 40s is that I've got a perspective that I did not have earlier in life. I am not claiming that makes me blessed with some "special gift." If anything, it's akin to saying, "...and I'm also breathing oxygen right now." Part of my perspective is that in figuring out how I approach my down-time is looking at the "true time cost." What that means to me is that whenever you do something, it is not just the time cost of the event. There is also the coming and going, the stopping of one thing and the re-starting of another. At my age, there are other people to consider and their schedules. Then, there is the matter of having some pure unscheduled time. Ori Brafman in his new book, The Chaos Imperative, talks about finding "white space" to think and work. I think that in both our work and non-work time, we need those blocks of time when we're not going or doing. That was also part of my thought-process about the game today.

http://oribrafman.com/books/the-chaos-imperative-hc

Who knows, today might be the greatest Iowa win in years. I hope it is, especially for those fans who brave the cold. (I do not include in this the idiots who will paint their chests and be exposed in the cold. That's not passion, that's just dumb.) You will deserve it. For me, I'll have to settle for watching it on TV. For this fair weather fan, that will have to do for today.

At least I got the flag up before kick-off. (Photo by Jeno Berta, flag owned by Jeno Berta, fair-use claimed of any copyrighted images.)